Another five minutes of walking uphill brought me to the farmhouse. It was a dilapidated building of old Welsh stone, smothered by imperial ivy and climbing roses that reached to the eaves. Ferns had taken root in the gaps between the stones, and a twisted elder grew flag-like from the chimney stack. Pigeons flew in and out of a broken bedroom window, and crows pecked like addicts for the linseed oil in the putty. I relaxed a little as I crossed the yard because I was sure there were no dogs here. The front door was open. An inquisitive sociologist, I had always told my students, should never let a threshold hold him back. I stepped inside.
I found myself in a large room that would have made the turbo-weekenders gasp both with joy and horror. There were two inglenook fires, a slate floor, white-washed walls and black-stained oak beams smothered with bunches of drying herbs. Three rabbits hung from an old bacon hook near the window.
A long kitchen table took up most of one side of the room; it was covered in rusty agricultural tools and oily parts from some engine or other, presumably a tractor. A couple of tins of rat poison sat at one end, next to a pile of
Picture Post
magazines and a bowl of rotting apples covered in vinegar flies. In one corner of the room stood a television on an upturned diesel drum, and in the other, a mattress covered over with a patchwork quilt, with a bowler hat hanging on a nail above a cracked mirror. A dozen empty Guinness bottles were lined up on the floor beside the mattress. On the wall above, was a signed photograph of a football team called AC Portoferraio, from one of the Italian leagues presumably, though I had never heard of them.
The right side of the room was almost bare. It was dominated by a large, gilt-framed canvas above the fireplace. Even I recognised it: Monica Sahlin's famous painting of her cousin rising to heaven in a wicker-basket, looking wistfully down through a cloud of harebells. On the mantelpiece below stood a sheep's skull with plastic miniature daffodils sprouting from the sockets of the eyes.
On either side of the chimney breast were shelves upon shelves of books and quaintly-bound periodicals, and, in the middle of the room, a small writing desk, with a chair set at an angle as if someone had just got up or was expecting to return. A blank writing pad lay on the desk, and, to one side, a tarnished pewter mug filled with sharpened pencils. On each corner stood a black and white photograph. The one on the left was a very fuzzy snap of a chubby, curly-haired man with a cigarette hanging from his lower lip. My stomach bled sour anxiety, for he looked like my father, who had only once brought me happiness and that was on the day of his dying.
The photo on the right of the desk was of an upright man in a sombre business suit, carrying a furled umbrella. Here, too, was a sense of deja vu: he looked like the men who had chased my mother for the money that my father had borrowed and never repaid. They had harassed me, too, as I was sent to the front door with well-prepared excuses: “Sorry, he's gone to Venezuela on business, and won't be back for six months.” I saw again the shock on my grandmother's face when the bailiffs took possession of her house to pay off my father's debts. This was the man who'd told me to send him half of my student grant, and made me feel it was the right thing to do; this was the man who stayed for two years in London hotels without paying his bills, was caught, imprisoned, released on probation and landed a job as general manager of a posh West End hotel, before careering downhill to Butlins. This was the man...
I moved quietly to the centre of the room and almost hit my head against something hanging from one of the beams. It was an old Corona lemonade bottle with a tapered, unstoppered neck. Inside was a little stuffed bird, or so I first thought, but when I looked more closely I was shocked to see it was actually a live wren, sitting on its own droppings, gasping for breath in the thin, warm air that managed to drop down to the bottom. I was trying to work out how the wren had been put in the bottle, when I heard someone spitting. I turned and moved towards the back of the house where a lean-to kitchen and bathroom had been built. I could see a washbasin with a pair of black shoes in it. Next to the basin was a bath, with a man bending so far in that his head was almost touching the bottom. He unfurled and stood upright. I could see something wriggling in his mouth. He turned away and spat into the lavatory bowl. He went back to the bath and leaned over, again stretching down inside. He came back up. There was a large brown spider between his lips.
I back-tracked nervously from the house, and sought refuge in the pub. O'Malley came over.
“Brains?” he asked.
“Look,” I said, holding the pump against his pull. He looked up curiously, as the flow stopped and tiny splutters of foam filled the glass. “Small sheds don't have rafters, nothing strong enough to hold a kicking pig.”
He put down the glass, and brought across a plate of tapas. “Clams covered in pancetta, then baked.”
“Shed some light on the mystery.”
The awful pun brought a generous smile. “It didn't stay forever with Dai Fern Hill, you know.”
“Tell me.”
“Geoffrey Faber took it to Tyglyn Aeron.”
“Faber? T.S. Eliot's publisher?”
“The very same.” He finished pouring my beer, and placed it on the counter with all the satisfaction of a fisherman playing out his line. “Go and see old Eli. I'll give him a ring to say you're coming.”
I drove to Lampeter to pick up a curry. Lampeter I liked. It was cosmopolitan, just like the part of London we had left. The pasty, chapel-serious faces of the locals were leavened by the black, brown and Chinese faces of students from the college. Hasidim rubbed shoulders with farm labourers in the Spar, hippies strummed in Harford Square, and Muslim women floated down the High Street in deep purdah.
A thickening mist slowed my drive home with the take-away. I remember the table was already laid, and Rachel was in the kitchen making raita, and warming some home-made nan. After that, my memory of what happened is extremely disconnected. We sat down at the table. We lit the candles and said a silent prayer. Rachel was picking up a spoon to serve the rice, and I remember that I was trying to tear the nan bread in two. I heard the creak of the yard gate, and wondered why the geese were so quiet. I heard footsteps outside, someone moving quietly around the yard. Mably was in the back room but, instead of barking furiously as he usually did at the slightest noise, he came whimpering through the house, and flung himself trembling under the table. There was a sound of scuffling feet outside the front door â we have no lobby and the door opens directly into the room where we were eating. I remember looking over my left shoulder, and seeing a white envelope come through the letterbox, and glide down to the doormat. I went across to pick it up. No address on it, just the lines
Find meat on bones that soon have none,
And drink in the two milked crags,
The merriest marrow and the dregs
Before the lady's breasts are hags
And the limbs are torn.
Rachel said something about the food getting cold, so I put the envelope on the table beside me and ate some mutton muglai. Then I saw the envelope move. I stopped eating, picked it up and slit open the back with my knife.
I heard Rachel screaming and the sound of her fork hitting the plate. I jumped to my feet and stood riveted as a black spider came through the slit in the envelope and worked its way towards my hand. The touch of its feet on my finger made me shudder and the envelope fell to the table. Dozens of spiders came spilling out. They scuttled across the table, some abseiling down to the floor, but most running wildly between the plates. Some of the larger ones had already clambered into the silver cartons and were now desperately trying to extricate themselves from the burning curries. I recall seeing three or four small green spiders burrowing into the pilau rice, and Rachel running to the other side of the room.
Foolishly, I picked up a nan and began swotting the spiders but the bread was not well suited to the task. I rushed into the kitchen to fetch a can of fly spray from under the sink. I sprayed it vigorously across the top of the table, Rachel angrily shouting “Poison us, go on, poison us, I would.” Then I heard something squealing with pain, the noise a small creature makes when the talons of a hawk strike through its flesh. I dropped the can and ran outside. The orange hazard lights on the car were flashing across the darkening yard. I walked nervously across. I could see the outline of a bird trapped in a layer of mist above the car. A live house martin had been impaled on the aerial.
I arrived late at the office the next morning. After a wasted hour shuffling papers across my desk, and wondering about the spiders and the man at Fern Hill, I rang the National Library. Tyglyn Aeron, they said, had been built in the early nineteenth century. Geoffrey Faber had bought it in 1930 and T.S. Eliot was a regular summer guest.
I grabbed a seafood ciabatta from the deli, and drove munching to meet Eli Morgan. O'Malley had said he was a gardener, and that was where I found him, leaning on a spade in the front garden of his small white cottage. He was tall and well-built, and looked surprisingly fit for his age. His eyes were hidden by a peaked cap, so that his face was dominated by the strong chin that jutted out like Mr Punch's, though much broader. We shook hands, and sat on a wooden bench beneath an old apple tree. I clipped a tiny microphone onto his lapel. Old habits die slow. I had carried a tape recorder almost every day of my working life as a sociologist. I could give all my attention to the speaker, not worrying about taking notes or trying to remember what was being said. It would be just as useful in my new role as rural sleuth.
I asked Eli what he remembered about Geoffrey Faber, and let him talk away.
“I worked down there in Tyglyn as second under-gardener, vegetables mostly, which we were sending by train up to London to Faber's house. The Head Gardener was Oaten, who came down here from South Wales with his wife and daughters, and you daren't glance at those girls for Oaten would give you a good beating. He was a brute.
“I seldom was talking to Faber, he was one above us. He was in church sometimes, or the shop. His tongue was sharp if you was upsetting him.”
“What did he want with Dai Fern Hill's shed?”
“Somewhere quiet to write, you see.”
“For himself, you mean?”
“Eliot.”
“Used to write in the shed?”
“That's it.”
“Did you ever see Eliot about?”
“He would stay mainly in the house. Sometimes we would see him writing in the shed. He and Faber used to go shooting, I know that. Big bugs they were, they weren't for mixing.”
“So Eliot didn't know any locals?”
“Not many.”
“None you can remember?”
“Well, that's not for me to say. But there are stories.”
We talked a little more about his prize vegetables, and then I left. As I walked down the lane, I had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching me. When I reached the car, I felt that something wasn't quite right, though I couldn't see what. I put the key in the door but it was already unlocked. I looked through the window but could see nothing missing or amiss so I opened the door and climbed in. I turned the ignition and started the engine. I pulled over the seat belt and snapped it in across my chest and looked, as I always did, in the rear view mirror.
But the rear view was missing. Someone had covered the mirror with a piece of paper. There was a verse on it, written in faint red ink:
Chew spider
suck wren
bitch's blood
fountain
penned.
Find meat on bones? Not his.
War on the spider and the wren!
I pulled the paper off, and opened the glove compartment to keep the verse for Rachel. Inside, still oozing blood, was a ring of puppy tails, threaded together with orange baler twine.
I drove fast to the Scadan Coch and asked O'Malley for a glass of RUC, and he quickly poured a double Bushmills into a pint of Guinness. “I've got some tapas for you,” I said, putting the tails onto the bar. “Fry for two minutes with sage, onion and tomato and serve in a roll, your original, authentic Ceredigion hot dog, your very own
chien chaud
, serve with relish if not enthusiasm.” I quick-marched half the RUC into my stomach. “Look, what the hell's going on?”
“You been asking about the shed?”
“You encouraged me.”
“You've upset him somehow.” O'Malley lifted the ring of tails from the counter. “I'll fry these over for the ferret.”
I finished my drink, and went home, taking the shortcut through the field behind the pub. As I crossed the old bridge, I could see Rachel rounding up the chickens. She was having difficulty in enticing the flighty Seebrights into the coop, and the big Sumatran cockerel was refusing pointblank to go in with the hens. I watched for a minute, enjoying the chaos, and then walked up the dark lane to the cottage.
I let myself in. I was half-way across the room when I saw the upturned bucket on the table. I padded round warily whilst I took off my coat, checked the answering machine and put the kettle on. “It's a letter,” said Rachel, coming in with one Seebright still clinging to the top of her shoulder. “I thought it was the safest place to put it.”